Global Knowledge Review is a new magazine from the UK that will cost you a couple hundred bucks for a year’s subscription, but the first issue is available as a free PDF download from the magazine’s Web site. Looks interesting. Among the debut issue’s article is a piece on “What Knowledge Workers Want.”

I’ve maintained for years that employee communications departments should be fully engaged in their companies’ knowledge management efforts. The article, by Ernst & Young’s former Chief Knowledge Officer Dave Pollard (who now runs Meeting of Minds), points to a number of problems average workers have with knowledge systems. The list includes…

* I can’t find anything
* I get what I need more effectively from conversations with customers, colleagues and trusted outsiders

I’ve said it before: If you want to know what’s going on in your company or who you should talk to about any particular topic, go outside and spend some time with the smokers. Work is a social activity and knowledge moves best in social structures. Traditional knowledge experts want to build big, expensive, unusable databases. Communicators, on the other hand, know how to manage the flow of information among employees. We just need to build KM goals into our internal communication strategies.

Get the first issue of the magazine containing this article at http://www.globalknowledgereview.com/page3.htm